Windows – Cannot turn on Network Discovery on Win 10

To explain Your Scenario :

What is network discovery ?

Network discovery is a network setting that affects whether your computer can see (find) other computers and devices on the network and whether other computers on the network can see your computer.

So now i turned off the network discovery now what will happen :

It will prevents your computer from seeing other network computers and devices and prevents people on other network computers from seeing your computer.

What Happens when you turn on network discovery :

From Technet

When enabled, the Network Discovery method gathers information about devices on your network, like the other discovery methods that are available in SMS do. However, the Network Discovery method is unique because, besides computers, it also finds network devices such as printers, routers, and bridges. Basically, the Network Discovery method finds any device on the network that has an IP address.

Now why i able to view other computers :

Network Discovery uses SNMP to discover routers and subsets. SMS(system mange server) Network Trace uses this data to provide information about the health of network links between SMS site systems.When you select the topology discovery type, Network Discovery discovers subnets and creates DDRs for network devices that have an SNMP agent. DDRs contain information about each identified resource.

With the topology discovery type, Network Discovery first connects to the local router (default gateway) to collect IP addresses from its ipRouteNextHop routing table. Network Discovery uses this information to find other network devices that are connected to the router.

Network Discovery attempts to query the specified DHCP servers to retrieve the active leases and defined subnet lists that are configured on that server. Network Discovery then attempts to resolve the IP address to a name for each network device and subnet that it discovers.

With the topology discovery type, Network Discovery first connects to the local router (default gateway) to collect IP addresses from its ipRouteNextHop routing table. Network Discovery uses this information to find other network devices that are connected to the router.

Note that you turned off network discovery in your computer so that your computers cant access your computer,But other network computers are not turned off discovery,so you will be able to view other computers.

My issue finally solved after several hours, without requiring to reinstall OS or go back to a previous restore point.

The sequence of commands which did it are given below. I ran them in Windows PowerShell (right click->Run as administrator)

1. Enable SMBv1 on the SMB server:

   Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters" SMB1 -Type DWORD -Value 1 -Force

2. Enable SMBv2 and SMBv3 on the SMB server:

   Set-ItemProperty -Path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters" SMB2 -Type DWORD -Value 1 -Force

3. Restart computer

4. Enable SMBv1 on the SMB client:

   a) sc.exe config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/mrxsmb20/nsi

   b) sc.exe config mrxsmb10 start= auto

5. Enable SMBv2 and SMBv3 on the SMB client:

   a) sc.exe config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/mrxsmb20/nsi

   b) sc.exe config mrxsmb20 start= auto

6. Restart computer

All the above commands are given in the Microsoft KB 2696547 article: https://support.microsoft.com/en-ie/help/2696547/how-to-enable-and-disable-smbv1-smbv2-and-smbv3-in-windows-and-windows-server. I had tried these commands earlier too, but missed to run the commands 4 and 5 above for the SMB client. Now after running all the commands, the issue is resolved!

Hope someone finds it helpful, and saves a few hours of time and endless frustration.